Is it something about me? Something I do? he wondered. Or is it just the universe’s sick joke that makes it the kiss of death for me to love someone? Emily, Honor—

He snorted bitterly, knowing the thought for self-pity yet unable to reject it just this once. And if he was being maudlin, what the hell business was it of anyone but himself? Damn it, he was entitled to a little maudlinism!

Amber light strings began to blink above the waiting docking buffers, a sure sign the pinnace was on final with the pilot looking for that visual cue, but White Haven didn’t even notice. Or perhaps he did, for the blinking lights took him back to that hideous day fifty years before when the supersonic med flight with its strident, eye-shattering emergency lights had delivered his wife’s broken and mangled body to the Landing General trauma center. He’d been there to greet the flight, summoned from his office at Admiralty House, but he hadn’t been there to prevent the air car accident, now had he? Of course not. He’d had his “duty” and his “responsibilities,” and they were both prolong recipients, so they’d had centuries yet to make up for all the time those inescapable concepts had stolen from them.

But he’d been there to see her carried in—to recognize the damage and cringe in horror, for unlike himself, Emily was one of the minority of humanity for whom the regeneration therapies simply did not work. Like Honor, a corner of his brain thought now. Just like Honor—another point in common. And because they didn’t work for her, he’d been terrified.

She’d lived. None of the doctors had really expected her to, even with all of modern medicine’s miracles, but they hadn’t known her like White Haven knew her. Didn’t have the least concept of the dauntless willpower and courage deep within her. But they did know their profession, and they’d been right about one thing. She might have fooled them by living, and again by doing it with her mind unimpaired, yet they’d told him she would never leave her life-support chair again, and for fifty years, she hadn’t.

It had almost destroyed him when he realized at last that the doctors were right. He’d fought the idea, rejected it and beaten himself bloody on its jagged, unforgiving harshness. He’d denied it, telling himself that if he only kept looking, if he threw all of his family’s wealth into the search, scoured all the universities and teaching hospitals on Old Earth, or Beowulf, or Hamilton, then surely somewhere he would find the answer. And he’d tried. Dear God how he had tried. But he’d failed, for there was no answer; only the life-support chair which had become the lifetime prison for the beautiful, vibrant woman he loved with all his heart and soul. The actress and writer and holo-vid producer, the political analyst and historian whose mind had survived the ruin of her body unscathed. Who understood everything which had happened to her and continued the fight with all the unyielding courage he loved and admired so much, refusing to surrender to the freak cataclysm which had exploded into her life.